Well, Hurricane Joaquin wasn’t quite Katrina as it passed offshore, but it still made its mark on South Carolina where at least 15 people have died as of this writing, mostly due to flooding. Hundreds of roads and bridges were shut down and tens of thousands of people were left without power for days.
These are extreme times when it comes to weather, and that’s a major understatement. Fires have burned nearly 10 million acres, many in areas of Washington and Oregon that should have still been covered in snow. Much of the Olympic Rain Forest in Washington, the wettest place in the continental United States, burned. Fires in California caused a couple of billion dollars worth of damages and I’m not sure if that number included the amount caused by power outages.
For those of you in the power rental business, these should be times of strong business. So business owners are still denying they need a backup power plan, are they? Are they hiding their heads in the sand? I suppose they are still denying climate change while floods and droughts and fires shut off the power in places that never had such issues before? Well, at least they don’t get hurricanes in New York City or New England, right? Or Michigan or Wisconsin? That was up until Superstorm Sandy.
The new “normal” is to expect the unexpected. The first 15 years of this century should have taught us that much at least. And if you’re in the power rental business, when you tell your customers or prospective customers about the damage that could be caused to their business by unexpected power outages, perhaps you should have a list handy of all the floods and fires and hurricanes and “superstorms” that caused major damages recently, weather events that people never dreamed would be as powerful as they were. So the message should be nobody is immune or exempt.
Of course, who am I to talk, right? I live in Southern California where we’ve been hearing about “the big one” for years, and I don’t even have a generator at my house!
Excuse the apocalyptic tone of this column. Maybe it has something to do with watching “Mad Max: Fury Road” last weekend, where the world has collapsed and people are going to war over a barrel of water, but this is a time of great extremes in weather and it doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon.
I also didn’t start this column with the intention of promoting anything, that’s really not my style, but I will mention that we’ve done some interesting webinars recently on the topic of preparing for potential power outages and helping customers to develop a back-up power plan, so if you haven’t heard and seen those webinars, they are available on demand on our website and you just need to go to http://rermag.com/webinar and register and you can watch them for free.
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Take a look at our Industry News this month and you’ll see some interesting personnel news. Just about everybody in the rental industry knows Craig Paylor, the man who really made JLG tick for decades. It certainly seems that everybody knows him because when I’d go by JLG’s booth to say hello to Craig at a trade show, I’d have to stand in line because the booth would always be filled with people wanting to talk to him. Craig did a lot to make that company grow and he was well liked because he understood the rental industry and rental people and the issues they were dealing with as well as anybody from any manufacturer.
Now Craig will go to work on the rental side as chief operating officer of the Ahern group of companies, and while that includes Ahern Rentals it also includes a couple of major manufacturers, Xtreme and Snorkel. So Craig will bring his expertise and knowledge to the aerial manufacturing side as well.
Also, Hertz Equipment Rental Corp., which has been building quite a management team with industry veteran Larry Silber at the helm and experienced rental people such as Bruce Dressel, Richard Marani and Carlo Cavecchi, has just added another with former Sunbelt Rentals vice president Chuck Miller, who will serve as vice president of operations. So expect HERC to do some big things in the months to come, not the least of which will be separating from Hertz as a standalone company.
Another big event was Caterpillar’s announcement that it will lay off 10,000 people over the next couple of years because of soft demand in the mining area. We’ll be following that story for a while to come.
